The Future Is Today

Homemade water-powered trike can do 0-160 in under 4 seconds

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Water is an incredibly powerful thing. Most of the time we observe it still, be it sitting in your drinking glass or while staring at a vast calm ocean. When put to work, however, water is a mighty tool.

It can be used for cutting. The ocean can rise up and ruin entire cities. It can be used to propel a homemade trike to insane speeds. Wait…what?

Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Using nothing more than the power of some collected rainwater and compressed air, a person on a trike has managed to hit an incredible speed in a remarkably short time. That speed is 162 mph—and the trike needed less than 4.0 seconds to get there.

Need another crazy figure of this lunatic 3-wheeled machine? How about the fact that it went from 0-62 mph in just 0.5 of a second. During those first 60 feet of travel, the rider was experiencing over 5 g of acceleration.

This is a tremendous application of a childhood game we used to play. Fill a plastic bottle with water, hook it to a release mechanism, and have that water propel the rocket into the sky. Or play the cheap-parent version where you shake up a two-liter bottle of soda and toss it on the sidewalk. Either way, you quickly learn just how powerful liquids can be.